Not a laptop suggestion, but in the short term have you tried using Minecraft with Optifine? It massively increases the framerate, my GFs GMA950-based lappy went from around 10fps on low to a rather consistent 60.

As for OT suggestions, I am currently looking at AMD Llano/Trinity based laptops, since the IGP of the A6/A8 models are supposedly fast enough to play quite a few games with decent settings. They arent particularly widespread (because they arent Intel ) so your other requirements might not be fulfilled by one, but they are a buttload cheaper than buying an i5/i7 with discrete graphics. However if money is no object (it is in my case), then the i5+GPU would probably serve you better

I'd not heard of Optifine. Might be good for my desktop if it works with Ubuntu. I have to use the media centre at the moment, which either means using a wireless mouse or sitting on the floor - neither are ideal!

I was looking at a £400 13" Sony which was AMD, but I forget the chipset. I'll have another look.

Thanks

I had a go at installing it in an Ubuntu VM i had sitting around, but the default game doesnt work at all so didnt get very far. ill have a go with a Live CD later on this week



thats around the same price as i am aiming for, seems like the A8-3500M is about the best you can do at that price. Others are based on the A6, which has a slightly weaker IGP but should still be enough for Minecraft, and possibly Skyrim. FYI the Skyrim performance graph on page 1 of this thread has numbers from the A10-4600M which is one of AMD's APUs, but is faster performing and more expensive than the A8

The AMD APUs are woeful at best, they struggle against the i3, let alone the i5...

But the iGPUs kick HD2/3000's ass. I have the smallest of the new AMDs in my netbook and it blows Atom out of the water. Full 1080p playback, plays old games ok and decent multi-tasking and all with 9hrs of battery life. Until you get to £500 and upwards, I wouldn't even consider Intel at the moment.

Well yeah it beats Atom, but that's not exactly saying much.

Yes the IGP is more powerful than Intel HD graphics (not sure how large the advantage is over Intel HD 4000), but it's still nothing compared to a discrete GPU of any flavour. The CPU aspect is simply terrible.

IMO an SSD over a HDD would be more important on a day to day basis than an Intel over AMD CPU.

Yeah, but like everything on both of those points, it's all about intended application.

The problem is, below £500 you can't really use anything for more than one or two things. The AMD APUs are brilliant for general browsing, video usage and gaming. The smaller ones are also pretty efficient and have good battery life. For everything else, you need Intel. But if you want to game, or even just watch 720p smoothly in the case of Atom, you need a discrete GPU.

For JJ, AMD seems like the better choice at this price point.

Given JJ's budget and portability requirements, I wouldn't recommend AMD at all.

I'm talking about the £400 example dude. He wants to game. You find a discreet carded Intel product that fulfils the portability requirement and I'll be impressed...

This was exactly my reasoning: the laptop would be used for gaming (mostly Minecraft), and in order to get an Intel laptop with a comparable GPU, you pretty much have to spend over £700, which is way out of my budget.

Anyway, I just thought this information might be useful to JJW since he has similar usage requirements, but clearly a much larger budget. I'll shut up if my suggestion was irrelevant

For £400 it's clearly AMD - no contest. But with JJ's budget it's fairly easy to find Intel machine with portability that match the AMD machines, but very few with extreme portability (ultrabook territory).

I've seen 'discrete GPU' mentioned a couple of times. Are you meaning dedicated, or is it a term I'm not aware of?

Discrete in this case refers to a GPU that is seperate from the CPU i.e. a component all of it's own. For gaming, Intel need a "tradtional" seperate graphics card, as the integrated solution on their CPUs is woeful. AMD don't have this problem as their APUs feature one processor that has fantastic graphics performance onboard. However, their computing power for CPU intensive tasks (not gaming) is far behind Intel.

So I've decided the GT 640M is plenty for gaming on a small-screen, and that I really don't want anything less. That's about all!

So far my main contenders are the Sony which Matt posted, and the Gigabyte U2442V Ultrabook.

Unfortunately, hands-on testing which I really want is next to impossible. Also, I want to order it this weekend, preferably last weekend so I can have it already!

Any thoughts on the Gigabyte clicky ? My main thought is I don't like the delivery date from there!

My main problem with the Gigabyte is lack of storage. I was going to say I can keep the games on the SSD and use the SD slot for media... but there doesn't seem to be an SD slot. I'm likely to be using this away from home with limited access to internet (maybe 3g) so streaming from my server isn't always going to be an option